Anticipatory-Avoidance
Learning

• "I say, I say, I say! Why have you got a banana in your ear?"
• "To keep the elephants away."
• "But there aren't any elephants for miles."
• "I know — effective, isn't it?"

The origin of such learning has often been authoritative injunctions from parents or others, but it is their anticipatory-avoidance nature — their perceived contribution to survival — which keeps them in being. Such learning is notoriously resistant to change.

The classic demonstration was an experiment by Solomon and Wynne (1953), bearing a resemblance to Seligman's protocol. Dogs were confined to a cage, of which half the floor could be electrified to give a shock: they were free to jump over a low net to the other side. A buzzer was sounded just before the shock, and the dogs rapidly learned to jump at the sound of the buzzer. The shocks themselves were discontinued, but the dogs continued to jump. Normally such conditioning would eventually have been extinguished by the removal of the unconditioned stimulus but not in this case: an informal account would say that the dogs had too much sense to wait around to find out if the shock was going to happen or not.

Original content updated and hosted at www.learningandteaching.info/learning/